Spring Acrostic Poems to Beautify Your Classroom

This post details how to teach students how to write a spring acrostic poem. We used spring as a topic for our acrostic poems. This post outlines the steps used to teach, plan, write, and create a rainbow poetry display.

This is lesson 2 in a 3 part poetry writing series.

Spring Acrostic Poems to Beautify Your Classroom

Introduction to Acrostic Poetry

I am passionate about teaching poetry in the classroom. Children love to learn poems and the exposure helps them strengthen their reading, writing, and listening skills. Read this post to find out more about why teaching poetry to children is beneficial and how to introduce poetry in your classroom.

To start our lesson on acrostic poetry, I start by explaining it using these poetry styles posters. Acrostic poetry is poetry where the first letter of each line spells out a word or message. It is written vertically down a page to reveal the word. We can write acrostic poems about any topic that we have information and ideas about.

A simple style of acrostic poetry to teach to children is using their names. Children write their names vertically and come up with ideas about each letter to write horizontally from each letter. Another idea would be to write acrostic poems about a certain topic you are studying in class. For example, if you are studying spiders you could write an acrostic poem using ideas about spiders (i.e. S=Spin webs, etc.). Using a season as a topic for an acrostic poem works great to elicit vocabulary and ideas about that season. For this lesson, we used spring as our topic.

Planning Spring Acrostic Poems

We started our lesson by reading Everything Spring by Jill Esbaum (affliate link). This book helps fill our senses with spring vocabulary and photographs. To prepare to write spring acrostic poems, I created an anchor chart template of a spring acrostic poem that we could complete together.

We went letter by letter brainstorming and sharing with the class all the words about spring that we could think of for each letter. We wrote our ideas on the white board as a reference. For example, S = sunshine, soaked, sprinkle, spring, sprouts, seedlings, etc.

Next, we went line by line creating a sentence that began with a word we thought of. For example, Sunshine warms the Earth. Completing the poem this way together on the anchor chart helps those students that need the extra support with their writing.

Writing Spring Acrostic Poems

Students are given a blank template to write their own spring acrostic poems. They are encouraged to use the words we thought of as a class, but to create their own unique sentences (no copying from the teacher). This template and a few planning sheets are available for free at the end of the post.

Since we took a fair amount of time to learn and practice acrostic poetry writing previously, students are fairly confident and independent in writing their poetry drafts. For a lot of writing with young children, usually one draft is enough, but with poetry writing I like to have a polished, edited piece to add to a display.

Creating a Spring Acrostic Poem Display

As a display for our spring acrostic poems, we re-wrote our poems on cut-outs that were meant to look like rainbows. To create the same look, cut large curved pieces of white card stock and draw 5 curved lines going from one end to the other. This creates 6 spaces, 1 for each line of the acrostic poem. Cut out 2 cloud shapes for the ends of each rainbow.

Students copy their edited poems in the spaces of their rainbow shape. I remind them to start writing midway to allow space for a cloud to be glued on to each end of the rainbow later on.

After re-writing their poems in the rainbow, they trace their writing with skinny markers to match the rainbow order. Remind students of the order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) before hand. After tracing the words, they can use pencil crayons or crayons to colour in the rainbow arcs with colours to match.

After the writing and colouring are complete, glue the 2 cloud shapes onto each end of the rainbow. Their spring acrostic poem display is complete!

Hang the spring acrostic poems up overhead to create a beautiful spring display that will brighten up any classroom.

Poetry Resources

FREE Spring Acrostic Poem Writing Templates

You can grab your own FREE spring acrostic poetry templates today by clicking the image below. Acrostic poetry writing and 12 other styles are included in the poetry writing unit available HERE. It includes posters, poetic terms, planning and creating sheets, many templates, and student poetry notebooks and covers.

The following resources can be easily integrated into the primary classroom and into any language arts curriculum. Each offers a wealth of engaging poems and activities to build a ton of skills and a love of poetry!

Even More Poetry Resources

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One Sharp Bunch has a wonderful spring poetry activity for you! Check her post with poetry activities for little learners.

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